Defining Enlightenment Reason: Core Characteristics
Analytical Nature of Reason
Reason is not only a part of nature but also the instrument or means by which we know and interpret the world and exercise critical thought. According to its nature, its action is analytical and cognitive. This term designates its opposition and difference from the use of reason in seventeenth-century rationalism:
- In contrast to the rationalist reason, supposedly pregnant with content (like the theory of innate ideas), which sought knowledge from itself deductively and a priori, believing it possessed the essential features of reality, Enlightenment reason is understood as the capacity to acquire knowledge through reference to experience and the empirical – an essential reference.
- In contrast to the ‘systematic’ and ‘deductive’ rationalist reason, Enlightenment reason is understood as the ability to analyze the empirical, seeking to understand the laws within what is given, through an alliance between the empirical and the rational.
Secularization of Reason
In contrast to the rationalist conception of reason, which ultimately referred to theology and aimed for a transcendent scope, the Enlightenment holds a secularized conception of reason.
Autonomy of Reason
AsKant wrote, Sapere aude: Have courage to use your own understanding.
This expresses the autonomous nature of Enlightenment reason. Reason is sufficient in and of itself. Therefore, it requires confidence and the decision to use it independently, without limitations other than those inherent in its own nature. Hence the need to analyze and recognize its limits.
Limits and Nature of Reason
The limits of reason are imposed by its nature. Reason is considered one and the same in all people, cultures, and eras. It possesses a set ‘essence or nature’ that develops over time but always aligns with this inherent essence. It is assumed that reason possesses a nature, just as the physical world possesses a nature or legality. This nature of reason is considered ‘rational’. This reflects what might be called the ‘naturalism’ of Enlightenment reason.
Critical Function of Reason
Reason itself needs its power and independence ‘clarified’ from that which constrained it. It is therefore a critical reason:
- Criticism of prejudices that blind and paralyze reason.
- Criticism of tradition, understood as oppressive baggage accepted solely because it is inherited.
- Criticism of external authority – authority not recognized or recognizable as such by reason itself.
- Criticism not necessarily of faith or gullibility itself (as reason could potentially recognize the meaning of religion), but specifically against superstition and idolatry.
Therefore, it’s not a critique against the idea of God or the divine per se, but against specific, irrational representations of God. Thus, critical Enlightenment reason should not be simplistically understood as an absolute denial of certain dimensions of life (like history, political law, or religion). Instead, it rejects ways of understanding these dimensions that contradict its core principle of rational clarification. In this sense, Enlightenment reason is tolerant. Tolerance, in the words ofVoltaire, is the heritage of reason.